Rediscovering Ray, humility in an auto

Culture and critiques go hand-in-hand, at least in Calcutta. This was once again drummed into my head, of all places, in an autorickshaw a few days ago.

Being born and brought up in Calcutta, I was not astonished when the driver of one such rickety vehicle told me that a TV channel would show Satyajit Ray’s celebrated movie, ‘Goopi Gayen Bagha Bayen’, that evening.

But you could have knocked me down with a feather when the man, in his early 30s, followed up with a critique on Ray: “Only he could show how an entire film could be made with the actors speaking only in rhymes.”

He was talking about ‘Hirok Rajar Deshe’ – the sequel to GGBB, and chortled when he saw my stunned face. “I’ve seen all Ray films,” he said in a matter-of-fact way as he wove his auto through the maze of traffic.

I could only sit back in silence, my interest growing, as the man who had dropped out of school after sixth grade continued his critique, the topic now shifting to what made ‘Nayak’ a remarkable film. “In this movie, it’s brilliant the way Ray portrayed the dejection of a silver screen hero.”

But Ray had his chinks, the man observed. The maestro, according to him, should not have had used any background music when Soumitra Chatterjee sang ‘ami chini go chini tomare’ – a romantic Tagore song in the film ‘Charulata’. “It would have been more realistic without the music, as he did in ‘Ghare Baire’, where he opted only for vocals.”

I was travelling from Girish Park to Phoolbagan, a half-an-hour stretch that ended soon but when I offered him a cup of tea, he smiled shyly and accepted. We walked down to a nearby tea stall to continue our tête-à-tête.

The man didn’t know about Henrik Ibsen, but knew well about the background of ‘Ganashatru’ – Ray’s cinematic version of Ibsen’s novel, ‘An Enemy of the People’. “This film was adapted from a foreign novel,” he said. “Ray made it so Indian that we forget it was basically based on a story written with a foreign locale as the backdrop.”

By then it was the time to say goodbye. The auto driver was all humility. “I’m a dropout and the last person qualified to comment on a master, but I talked so much because you kept prodding me,” he said apologetically.
I watched silently as he kicked start his autorickshaw and melt away in Calcutta’s dense traffic. If anything, that conversation had left me a humbler man than I am.